The modern aviation system is a marvel of technology and human enterprise. The idea that one can get into an aluminum cylinder powered by controlled explosions and soar through the skies, landing a few hours later in foreign lands, based on aerodynamic principles, still boggles the mind. To think that it can cost only a few hundred dollars and millions of people do it every day, is even more amazing.

Yet, following the Christmas 2010 weekend storm in the Northeast, the media was out doing what they do, trying to find someone to blame. The fact that this was a massive storm and the fact that airlines seem to handle this well, did not seem to matter. Due to the tarmac delay rules, introduced in April 2010, no passenger on any US airline was forced to wait on the runways – the few cases where this occurred all involved foreign carriers.

The tarmac delay rule specified massive fine ($27,500 per passenger delayed) for tarmac delays over three hours. And it worked. Instead of risking such fines, which can easily amount to millions of dollars per airplane, US airlines simply canceled flights even before the storm hit. More than 5,000 flights were canceled just in the New York area by airlines operating in LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark airports. Thousands more flights were canceled throughout the country. Naturally, some of the cancelations were due to operational considerations – deciding where it would be best to have planes and crews during the storm - but the fact that the only airplanes involved in long tarmac delays were foreign, speaks for itself. US carriers do not have different operational considerations from British Air, Air France, or Cathay Pacific, yet those carriers decided to fly when US carriers decide to cancel flights preemptively. This does not mean that the tarmac delay policy is beneficial. It only means that it works; US airlines are rational decision makers and in the face of potential massive fines, decided not to take the risk.

The two interesting open questions are 1) does the tarmac delay rule make sense? And 2) given that it is in effect, how can airlines ease the customer burdens?

December 10, 2010

The Wikileaks controversy is part of a bigger, ongoing battle between the transnational publics linked by the Internet and government by traditional, territorial nation-states.

Whatever one's opinion about the wisdom and ethical justification of the Wikileaks revelations, it has shown that there is a new force in the world that national governments and their diplomats don't know how to control yet. The U.S. government's attempt to suppress or block the Wikileaks’ cables not only has failed; it has made the U.S. look a lot more like China and other governments hostile to the Internet.

That problem is the theme of Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance. The book explains how the contradiction between networks and states shows up in a number of areas, ranging from copyright protection to content regulation to the global management of Internet addresses and domain names. Wikileaks is only the latest and most sensational example.

December 02, 2010

Well, almost everywhere. Yesterday the Wall Street Journal ran a review of the Czech-born, Canadian-residing polymath's latest book, Prime Movers of Globalization, a history of diesel and turbine engines and their importance to the trend of globalization. Here's a sample from the review, written by Nick Schulz of the American Enterprise Institute:

Mr. Smil's account of the engineering advances throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries— advances that brought the world large marine diesels and gas turbines—is first-rate history, both thorough and compelling. It is also fairly technical for the lay reader. But the rich detail doesn't just explain the intricacies of the engines and how they work. It also helps to show how easily we take for granted machine-power of such marvelous sophistication and, relatedly, why an environmental dreamer might mistakenly imagine its disappearance within a quarter-century.

Also, we can't resist noting that Foreign Policy magazine recently included Smil on its second annual list of the world's 100 most important global thinkers. Number 49, to be exact, citing him for his "career of interdisciplinary contrarianism, writing hundreds of scientific articles and dozens of books attacking sacred cows of Western environmental and geopolitical thought."